Gelderen A History of English Reflexive Pronouns

Person, Self, and Interpretability
Erscheinungsjahr 2000
ISBN: 978-90-272-9917-8
Verlag: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 39, 291 Seiten

Reihe: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

This book brings together a number of seemingly distinct phenomena in the history of English: the introduction of special reflexive pronouns (e.g. myself), the loss of verbal agreement and pro-drop, and the disappearance of morphological Case. It provides vast numbers of examples from Old and Middle English texts showing a person split between first, second, and third person pronouns. Extending an analysis by Reinhart & Reuland, the author argues that the ‘strength’ of certain pronominal features (Case, person, number) differs cross-linguistically and that parametric variation accounts for the changes in English. The framework used is Minimalist, and Interpretable and Uninterpretable features are seen as the key to explaining the change from a synthetic to an analytic language.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gelderen, Elly van

Gelderen, Elly

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Einzelne Sprachen & Sprachfamilien
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie